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JPEG Committee On The Ball, Seeks Prior Art
Sangui5 writes: "It seems as if the JPEG Committee has noticed the recent patent fuss, and is working on the prior art angle. Good to know that even though there's a new standard, the committee is standing by their previous work."
The idea is just silly. Makes me want to go patent the Redbook standard and sue the RIAA.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
According to the article, JPEG 2000 has had extensive work done to obtain royalty-free licensing. In general, it is thus implied that the JPEG committee believes JPEG 2000 to be unaffected by the patent claims which allegedly restrict the existing JPEG standard.
Ahh, time to bust out with my prOn collection. As every /. reader knows the prOn industry has been at the bleeding edge of technology. :)
Im sure some one has an image that can show prior art.
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
"We wanted to ensure the investment community and the general public are clear about the terms of our valuable JPEG data compression technology, one of the many technologies we have in our patent portfolio," stated Richard Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer at Forgent. "We are in ongoing discussions with other manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners and other products that use JPEG technology for licensing opportunities."
I'm not sure I'd even praise the JPEG group for taking swift action - I'd say they're doing what's necessary to combat Forgent's crime. Doing their job as a standards body like an officer does his job as a member of the police. Read that press release again, and try not to grit your teeth.
If you want my opinion (and I'm sure you don't), a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted - for a calculated conspiracy to defraud the general public and standards bodies.
... the Porn Industry is expected to hit a recession... heh :)
"Derp de derp."
The JPEG Committee had to do this. So what if there is a new standard? Without securing the old one, who would adopt the new one.
They could say two things:
1) We've got a new standard. Just move every image on the web to it.
2) This is absurd. We're going to fight this, but if all else fails, slowly adapt the new standard.
At least now, with option number two, they maintain credibility, as they don't have unreasonable expectations.
Also, a bit off-topic, but is there any real competition for a web photo-quality image format? PNG is an obvious GIF killer and is slightly entrenched (IE, has browser support), but JPEG2000 isn't as far as I know.
Their patent describes a technique for digital video compression that uses some of the same mathematical techniques as JPEG, only their method requires more than one frame to be present to offer any significant compression (so I have been told).
If that is true, that alone should be enough to tell Forgent to piss off.
IANAL
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I know that in trademark law, if a company fails to vigorously enforce a trademark they lose claim to it. The effect of this is McDonald's sometimes sues a little family restarant called McDonald's and other strange insane lawsuits.
Does this same thing not apply to patent law at all? A company has a patent, allows it to be deluted, and then goes after everybody. In trademark law, this would be thrown out of court.
Now you could say "Trademarks and Patents are two different things" but they are really aren't. And so I'd like a laywer to explain to me WTF gives companies the right to broadside tech firms every few months with bullshit patent claims.
So.. If they want prior art that pre-dates the patent in question, all we need to do is find, lurking in some deep and dark corner of the internet, some REALLY old JPEG compressed image, most likely pornography.
Course, to prove that this file really was old, we'd have to find the subject and maybe pose them the same way to show it's the same person, and then.. uhh.. no, wait.. old person porn.. Eww!
Please disregard!
*opens wallet, prepares to just pay the stupid royalties*
-Matt
Not at all, the algorithims are from seperate families. GIF and PNG are lossless compression, while JPEG uses discreet cosine transform (lossy) I believe. I could be wrong however. As for having an open alternative to JPEG, I think JPEG2000 is supposed to fit the bill.
The irony in this is that standards bodies are part of the Great Word Capitalism, which is the same general philosophy/entity that created frivolous lawsuits and absurd patents. At least the first group Forget (intentionally misspelled) contacted wasn't the developers of The Gimp or something.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Didn't Rambus get slapped for this sort of trick? If I remember correctly, they held certain IP which they did not disclose during the standards meetings. Then they waited until lots of other companies were using those standards, which incorporated their IP. When the momentum was already strong, they attempted to collect absurd royalties, and let loose their legal dogs to pounce on anyone who didn't ante up. Sounds verrrrrryyyyyy familiar.
1) Patent 4,698,672 can be searched for at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm. The URL is too long to paste here.
2) The jpeg.org page seems to indicate that the patent only affects the baseline implementation of JPEG. If this is true, then it should be possible to write a new baseline implementation that doesn't infringe on the patent.
3) I'm curious what prior art will show up. In 1986, many people were still using BSAVE/BLOAD to store images.
JPEG cuts the image into 8x8 pixel blocks, then compresses them. JPEG2000 uses streaming wavelet compression that can decompress and increase resolution as the file is transferred. The current patent doesn't affect gif/png, but it might make someone think they can announce a patent on png just like Forgent did with jpg.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
It's actually a 2-dimensional DCT (discrete cosine transform), some quantization applied inequally (the low-frequency components are better represented; this is the lossy part), and then entropy-coded (Huffman or arithmetic, aka zip-like lossless compression) in a cool zig-zag fashion. Here's a quick, decent summary.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
If the patent was filed in 1986, then it will expire in 2003, 17 years later. Please remember that the underlying problem with patents is bad legislation.
Got friends?
It seems to me that a patent that has been released into the public domain (at least for non-commercial use) should remain so if and when the patent is sold. I don't believe that there is any law requiring this, but anyone selling an 'open patent' should include a requirement that it remain open as terms of the sale to avoid this very situation.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone should decide to challenge a patent that was open only to be closed at a later date. Think about the series of events: Group A invents an image compression algorithm and grants me license to use the patent free of charge. I develop a group of products based on this agreement. Everything is cool until Group B buys the patent and says I can't use the patent anymore (or worse, demands back royalties). But wait, my products were based on a agreement I had with Group A, not Group B. Group B came in after the original agreement and is trying to change the terms of my agreement with Group A after I've executed the agreement. I would argue that Group B would be compelled to honor any agreements that Group A had in force at the time of the purchase as part of the package of buying the patent.
===
All your patents are belong to us.
When all else fails, run.
To see why, consider the standard process for creating a patent in a large company:
- You write up an overview of the patent, and submit it. Presumably you know your field, so the first 'prior art filter' is you - have you heard of anything similar?
- You hand it over to your companies patent agent. (S)he will probably be assigned to a particular field (e.g. 'audio/video/image processing'), so understands the area, but is not going to be an expert.
- The patent agent reads through your explanation and does a prior art search - and returns to you a selection of things that may be relevant.
- You explain how your invention is novel compared to these. If you convince him, then the wheels are set in motion, and your company (eventually) submits a patent application.
- The Patent Office reads it and searches for prior art. If they find none, your patent is granted, while if they find something, then it is up to you/your company to dispute their findings.
So, in steps 3 & 5 you have legal experts who understand the area, but are probably not technically expert in the exact field of the patent who have a responsibility to search for prior art. They are also under time pressure, as they have loads of proposals to deal with. So what they do is pull out a few relevant keywords from the proposal and search on them in some prior-art database.The most obvious (and easy) database is the existing patents DB. Now, I'm sure they have other databases they use, but whenever I've been through the process, nearly all the potential prior art which has been returned to me via the patent agent has been previously published patents. So if an idea hasn't been patented before, then it's got a good chance of getting accepted as a new patent.
So if the JPEG group build an extensive, easily searchable catalogue of prior art (with times, keywords, etc.), then it will make the patent agents life a lot easier, thus increasing the quality of patents.
GIF lossless? Hardly.[...]255 colors and an alpha channel
Gifs are lossless. Just because you can't use more than 256 colors, doesn't mean the format is lossy. And Gifs don't have an alpha channel, per se, you can just define one of the 256 colors as being completely transparent or not.
So how will this impact the whole GIF vs. PNG thing?
GIF's continue to be bad; PNG's continue to be good
Ignoring the philosophical reasons, PNG's are better:
- (In my experience) PNG's are smaller
- They support a variety of compression standards (see pngcrush)
- They support a larger number of colors. GIF's used a 8 bit palette; PNG's can do truecolor, greyscale or 8 bit palette
- They support animation (through the related MNG standard)
- They support transparency through alpha channels. Alpha channels are a very good thing that I could rant and rave about (but I won't
;) - They support gamma correction
- They support more intelligent interlacing than GIF's
See http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html for more information, if you're so inclined.ID-10-T is a way of life
Computers are not magical beings, capable of exercising judgement.
The problem is that the default for patent applications, since the PTO reform of several years ago, is "granted".
It should be *harder*, not easier, to prove lack of prior art. The failure of a database query hardly constitutes "lack of prior art". It also does noting with regard to the uniqueness or obviousness provisions.
Your suggested database would result in *more*, not *fewer* bogus patents being granted, because it would accelerate the application process without adding any protection above and beyond what's already there.
-- Terry
Although it does smell a bit like Rambus, the situations aren't really similar at all.
The big difference here is that Rambus was a member of the standards body in question (JEDEC). The agreement they signed to become a member of this standards body obligated them to disclose patents. They didn't and thus violated a contract.
As far as I can tell, Forgent is not a member of the JPEG organization, nor did they ever propose to the JPEG body that they adopt their IP as a standard.
The two situations may look similar on the surface, but that is where the similarities end.
Time for you to go back to school and learn the difference between lossless and lossy compression, methinks.
GIF only appears lossy because what you're compressing with it requires more colours than it can provide. The GIF format itself uses only lossless compression.
How will a database fix things?
Even if it's "the bestest database ever", it still has to be searched by humans with a sufficient understanding of the practice of the art to select appropriate search terms, by way of a common lexicography with the filing mechanism which was used to load the "magic database".
In other words, why is the problem ammenable to a fractional technical answer, in your opinion?
I really don't understand what a database will do, other than identify what has or has not been patented previously -- and therefore, it will not contain anything which would otherwise fail the obviousness test, since such things are not patentable.
Also, FWIW: In the U.S., they are called "patent examiners", not "agents", and the filer bears the brunt of the search for prior art, in a seperate process called a "patent search". It's not up to individual examiners to prove that something was not patented previously.
The only thing your database does is make it easier to file patents by making it easier for the non-patent-office-personnel to do their searches.
In other words, the suggested database does not address any of the process issues that are the root of the problem in the first place.
If you want to dicuss fixes... fine. But creation of a database is not a fix, it's just a means of exacerbating the problem.
-- Terry
"a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted"
I agree. If it's not illegal yet, it should be. It doesn't even matter whether or not this particular patent is applicable to JPEG, this is yet another case of abuse of the patent law to do things that the law was not intended for. A big part of the problem is that fighting this nonsense required ridiculous amounts of time and money, making it really effective for the "plaintiff" even if they are not holding a valid and applicable patent. And that is just sad.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
which are owned by companies that take part in JPEG.[1]
And mentions some nice licensing guidelines: But earlier on Slashdot in Slashback: Alternatives, Ads, Apple A discussion regarding the licensing scheme to Jpeg2000 pointed to it (the license) being open. Can anyone verify that Jpeg2000 has an unencumbering license?
I used to write software for a very large corporation. We were frequently encouraged to file patents for anything that we invented. We were rewarded even if our patent application was rejected. A successful patent application was a big deal. The corporation was quite sensibly trying to build up its portfolio of patents.
Eventually, you may have to work for some big corporation to write software. Only someone with a big software patent portfolio will be in a position to cross license with the other big players and thereby receive legal permission to use a basic set of key patents. I expressed this concern to a lawyer at Unisys, and his response was basically 'So what?'. He said that he thought that this had already happened in the chemical industry.
I guess that I was something of a crackpot to voice these views inside the big corporation where I worked. It was very encouraging to find out that the folks at the League for Programming Freedom(http://lpf.ai.mit.edu) share my reservations about software patents.
They did this to personally slight you. Ignore that there are several different people working on a backend where (litterally) thousands of stories are entered by hopeful posters every day. The major first step in this is the quick scan of titles, where they just tick off any titles which seem like confused or bad posts. Then they have to sivv through all the remaining ones, edit (which they don't really do well here at /.), and post. They do this all day, most days. But ignore that and assume they did it just because they don't like you.
Now come back to reality. They do not have a personal "out to get warpedrive" cabal meeting every week, nor did they reject your story because of any reason other than they just rejected it. Things which are bad in the world happen because they do, not because someone or something is out to get you. HTH. HAND.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Wow, them'z angry words over a file-format comparison. Never thought .GIF vs. .JPG would stir 'a feudin'.
.GIF. It has a 1-bit transparency channel and can be animated. It decompresses quicker, on an image heavy site that's really important. With a good ditherer, .GIF photos can look just fine. .GIF is lossless. The color information is a pre-processing effect applied before the image is compressed. This drops the total colors down to 256 (or lower for better compression.) If you take that image, compress it again (same as I said above), you don't lose any data in the image. If you take JPEG, and recompress an image, you lose more data.
"Are you on crack? Take a photo, compress it via png... what are those nasty artifcats, diffusion paterns, etc, etc..."
PNG is lossless. You can run some optimizations to lessen the amount of data in it before compressing, that's where some of the compression comes in. If you run the same compression twice, you don't get a worse image.
"And what the hell are you doing compressing a photo with gif in the first place? Jpeg is meant for photos, and gif is meant for low-color pictures. When you draw line-art that has at most 256 colours, gif is lossless."
There are valid reasons to go with
That clarify things a bit?
It's not the layout that bugs me (it looks like it has been there a while, but the front page a new site will be up shortly), it's the fact that the first sentence is incomplete:
Considerable interest has been expressed in the views of the JPEG committee concerning claims made by Forgent Networks Inc on their web site that intellectual property that they have obtained through their acquisition of Compression Labs Inc.
If they can't proofread text for a website, it makes me worry about them proofreading other documents... such as standards, or the fine print that says "we own the IP we're touting in these proposals."
Get off my launchpad!
As the Forgent mess shows...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Hire Google to overhaul the USPTO prior art database.
> Hire Google to overhaul the USPTO prior art database.
Or, hire Microsoft to wreck^H^H^H^H^H maintain the entire USPTO database.
Perhaps a closer analogy is Unisys. For many years, GIF files were the thing to use. They were popular on Compuserve, then on local BBSes, and along with JPEG, became the image file format of choice on the web. After all of that, Unisys decided to take advantage over their LZW patent, and require a small royalty for any applications that used GIFs.
It wasn't too much later that slashdot came around and posted a link to http://burnallgifs.org/. I wonder how long it will be until they post a link to http://burnalljpegs.org/.
No, GIF is not a lossy format. You can take an image with 256 or less colours and compress, uncompress, recompress, and uncompress again with no loss of quality.
The dithering that takes place to reduce images with more than 256 colours is lossy. You probably don't want to use GIF for photographs, for this very reason. But the actual compression scheme is very similar to zip compression, which isn't lossy either.
Someone needs to learn the difference between compression and dithering. In fact, two of you do...
If Phillips no longer holds a patent, what (monetary) incentive do they have in trying to force record companies to adhere to the CD standard instead of corrupting it with their wacky, hopeless "protection" schemes?
Whether Phillips holds a patent or not is irrelevant.
The reason Phillips (rightly) got upset is because the offending companies were still using the CD-logo, which is trademarked by Phillips.
Trademarks don't expire, as long as the company that holds them continues to pay for and police them.
I'd scorch the heiney of the moron who allowed this drivel so totally that the closest he'd get to papents again is shining shoes.
I think that the patent office should go back to being a not-for-profit organization or government departement, ASAP.
This was a STUPID idea from the get go.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Oh no! They've been shanghai'd!
(incoming rotten tomatoes in 3... 2... 1...)
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
Actually, there is a principle similar to that which you describe. Go Googling for 'laches' or 'law of laches' and you'll find the relevant material.
If a patent holder is aware of infringing activity and doesn't do anything about it for a period of time (six years in the United States) then the infringer is not liable for damages.
However, unlike a trademark, a patent does not lapse without enforcement. As soon as the patent holder does get around to notifying the infringing party, then they can start claiming damages from that point on.
In other words, they can't sue every instance of 'infringement' that took place over the last fifteen years--they have forfeited that right. They may, however, demand royalties for further uses of JPEG compression. Assuming, of course, that their patent does cover the method in question, and that it holds up in court, and no prior art is found, and so forth...
IANAL, YMMV.
~Idarubicin
Seriously, the user community should hold off on trying to mass migrate from JPG until a)we have a viable alternative (is JPEG2000 ready for mass adoption?) b)Forgent actually wins a case against someone for violating this patent.
While I think patents on what amounts to math are ridiculous, I also think there needs to be some recognition that Forgent has forfeited its right to profit on this invention by waiting several years for the technology to spread into wide use. Forgent should have been filing C&Ds several years ago when JPGs were already all over Usenet (I remember seeing JPGs in 1995 at least). I realize this is patent and not trademark law, but had they tried to enforce these rights earlier probably an alternative to JPG would have been generated a lot sooner.
I do not have a signature
Some (at least one of which I was aware) of the RAMBUS agreements with Memory Makers were
set up to become null and void if the RAMBUS patent claims were ever successfully challenged
in court.
Perhaps some of the companies rolling over on the JPEG claims applied a similar loophole
in their agreements, hoping that a challenge to Forgent's patent claims would prove a
more viable approach than trying to defend thier own company in open court.
"Have you ever made any comparsions? Photos are usually a lot larger when compressed as gif, instead of jpeg. And you only get 256 colors."
.JPG' I didn't say "Use .GIF instead of .JPG". I didn't even say ".GIF can look as good as .JPG".
.GIF is still used along with .JPG. Is JPG gonna be better than .GIF in most situations? Certainly, it's better than .PNG in most situations as well. However, you asked "And what the hell are you doing compressing a photo with gif in the first place?" and I gave you a few reasons he might. Don't pull out deeper reasoning than I expressed.
That is an excellent response to something I didn't say. I didn't say '.GIF compresses smaller than
You misinterpreted me. I was explaining why
Doubtful. My Dual 1.4 gig Athlon takes a noticable hit when a bunch of .JPG's need to be decoded. .GIF shows up quicker AND it uses 1/3rd the memory.
Remember this: I don't live in a world of absolutes.
The way these standards work (or are supposed to) is that everybody who owns IP related to them agrees to license without-fee for implementers of the "baseline". They (usually) also agree to licence on RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) terms any nifty extras (optional features not included in baseline).
The one catch is that it's only free if you follow the standard. Using JPEG2000 technology in something that isn't JPEG2000 can get you in trouble, because the free license is only for ppl. who follow the standard.
You can purchase a copy of the standard directly from ISO, or from various local standards bodies. In the US, that would be ANSI. You can buy from ANSI here. They recently dropped their price (it used to run ~$140), probably because of price competition from ISO and Standards Australia (note that prices from ISO and SA are *not* listed in USD, an that the Australian price includes a 10% tax that will be waved for foreigners). And electronic copy of a standards document is about as fungable as you can get.
Other than the requirement that you stick to the standard, it's totally free (barring submarine patents). You don't even have to notify anyone that you're implementing it. And the JPEG people have worked really hard (even harder than with the original) to ensure that J2K is unencumbered, so even the threat of submarine patents is small.
Especially on the /. backend (obligitory shot of Timothy working on it), there's just a whole ton of shit flying through it a lot. People who have crackpot schemes or stuff which was posted before will litterally spam and spam and spam for days to get something posted. In the noise good stuff is lost, it happens.
What you need to do is just try again.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Of course, all of this requires large stacks of money to go to court. This is yet another example of why allowing software patents was such a big mistake in the U.S.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I think there was an article (comment, really) a while back about someone who inserted a "bug" that would only appear with a precise set of commands or keystrokes.. something that wouldn't normally happen, but the error would indicate who the author was, so he could come back and say that he wrote it, assuming his company edited his name out and re-released it without his permission or something.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
This is exactly the type of answer I was looking for.
Thank you, not only for the info, but for the peace of mind.
*beer*
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The problem with democracy is that people have to go out and vote again and again ;)
Some class of problems.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Once you've taken all of the colors out of the rainbow, you've got nothing left to lose.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Ah for the 1970's when you could spend your hard, ehm, allocated money printing 5 foot high line-printer images of Farrah Fawcet. Careful character choice and multi-strinking each line was used to create the illusion of grey-scale.
I guess you could think of it as half-tone the geek way.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
No, I'm saying when you're submitting a story, you're voting for it (in a way). In order to keep up with the rest of the noise, you have to keep voting for it. It's still one of the better systems available, although I do like K5's voting queue a little more :)
As for voting for people in office, maybe you shouldn't be trying to always read the negative into statements.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You are right on the money, and should be mod'ed up.
Of course patent, and all IP laws need to be revised. They are starting to do exactly what they were intended to prevent...
What incentive do I as a creator, inventor, artist have to produce if doing so simply puts me at risk of being thown in jail and or financially ruined by someone with a previous vague patent, purchased at auction.